One of the areas of computing that is experiencing the most rapid growth is in robotics and autonomous vehicles (UxVs). Herein, the term UxV will be used to refer to unmanned vehicles of any type. These might be aerial vehicles (UAVs), ground vehicles, water borne, subsurface, or any other type. Their common trait it that they are all remotely operated and may include some level of autonomy, although autonomy is not required. The term “robotics” refers to an autonomous vehicle that does more than just move and sense. It also may manipulate its environment with end-effectors that could include any form of tool or grasping mechanism.
All robotics and UxVs contain one or more processors and may contain sensors for sensing the local environment. The sensors may feed data into a processor for automatically managing local control of the vehicle, or it may be fed back to a human operator for local control, or some mix of these two operating modes.
Those vehicle also typically include some form of digital communications for passing data back to their remote operator if there is one, or between vehicles for coordinated behaviors, or some mix of these two modes. Also, there may be more than one type of digital communication used on any one vehicle. It may have an 802.11x variant for wireless high speed communications, it may use cellular networks, and it may also use Bluetooth for short range communications. All of these may be present in some form and more than one form may be present concurrently.
In many ways, robotics and UxVs are similar to ubiquitous mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets and the “Internet of Things” (IoT) with the added capabilities of independent or semi-independent operation. Similar to mobile devices, robotics and UxVs operate in unique computing environments that are constantly changing partly due to an environment that is constantly changing. The environments that robots and UxVs operate in are no more or less secure that any other computing environment. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that these vehicles and devices must commonly function independent of a human operator. Therefore, policy-based control is even more critical for these devices but it must be able to adapt to changing conditions.
What is needed for these types of computing devices is an autonomous and adaptive mechanism for changing security policy in a completely dynamic way. Adaptability to changing conditions is required for this domain. The present invention discloses a system and methods for autonomous and adaptive policy-based control of remote and locally controlled computing devices that addresses these requirements.